Alarm Management

A widespread issue in manufacturing plants is alarm overload. As formerly independent systems are integrated for more effective operation by fewer operators, each operator has to monitor an increasingly wider area and consequently deal with more alarms. Without rigorous alarm rationalization efforts, alarm flooding becomes a serious problem and increases the risk of safety and environmental incidents.

There are a number of documents such as EEMUA #191 and ISA 18.2 that help customers reduce alarms, but practical tools that can be implemented are still in short supply. Yokogawa proposes a smart approach to alarm management that helps customers achieve safe and agile plant operations based on the concept of combining practical bottom-up solutions with fundamental top-down improvements.

Yokogawa urges customers facing alarm flooding situations in their plants to introduce CAMS for HIS. It also benefits those who are looking for alarm management capabilities that go beyond the current generation of DCS alarm systems. Customers planning to consolidate their control rooms and design their alarm system to be in compliance with the ISA 18.2 standard will benefit from this product's practical and immediate solutions.

Plant operators are often faced with a high number of alarms and abnormal situations and are therefore unable to respond quickly enough to prevent safety related incidents, environmental issues, shutdowns and equipment damage. A poorly applied alarm management policy resulting in excessive alarms and events can also make operators routinely ignore alarms due to the excessive amount of information being received.

Exaquantum/AMD (hereafter known as 'AMD') is Yokogawa's Master Alarm Database solution. Based on ANSI/ISA-18.2-2009 and EEMUA 191, AMD assists managers and supervisors in monitoring, assessing and auditing the behaviour of alarm setpoints as part of an alarm documentation and rationalization program.

Exaquantum/SER is an event driven integrated reporting system that acquires alarm & event messages and point data from plant monitoring and control systems, and stores this information in a single database for ease of analysis.

The new Exaplog event analysis package facilitates the quantitative analysis of problems in the DCS event log. By alternating analysis with alarm setting adjustment and operation sequence tuning, you can continuously improve operational efficiency.

✓ Report of current state of Alarm
✓ Statistics of Alarm & Events
✓ Statistics of manual interventions
✓ Top 5 Bad actors for Alarms

Alarm Philosophy

✓ Alarm Philosophy document compliant with ISA 18.2 standards

Fundamental Nuisance Alarm Reduction

✓ Report of the Nuisance alarms in the plant
✓ Root cause for the Nuisance alarms
✓ Countermeasures to prevent alarming for the Nuisance alarms
✓ Report containing the before and after improvements from this service

✓ Report of the current Alarm state and the gaps in design compared to standards
✓ Support in the design of the new Alarm system as per standards
✓ Training on conducting Documentation & Rationalization exercise

Alarm management is not just a project that has a start and end date; it's a continuous cycle. Once the alarm system has been reviewed and improvements have been identified, we must check that controls are in place to ensure the alarm system remains functional. The key is to ensure that the system is continuously monitored and any changes are fully documented. There are seven key steps for alarm management. Rationalization is one of those critical steps.

A widespread issue in manufacturing plants is alarm overload. As formerly independent systems are integrated for more effective operation by fewer operators, each operator has to monitor an increasingly wider area and consequently deal with more alarms.

Alarm rationalisation and management is vital if plant operators are not to be overwhelmed by a rapid proliferation of alarm systems. A widespread issue in manufacturing plants is alarm overload. As formerly independent systems are integrated for more effective operation by fewer operators, each operator has to monitor an increasingly wider area and consequently deal with more alarms.